South Korea: Democracy, the Chaebol, and the Lawsuit as a Weapon

by bam

South Korea compresses a century of labor history into four decades. Under Park Chung-hee's developmental dictatorship, cheap and tightly controlled labor was not a side effect of the economic miracle, it was the policy, and the teenage women sewing in the Peace Market's attic workshops paid for it. On 13 November 1970 a 22-year-old tailor named Jeon Tae-il burned himself alive beside a copy of the Labor Standards Act the state refused to enforce; his reported last words, "We are not machines", became the founding sentence of the modern Korean labor movement, and his mother Lee So-sun spent the next four decades building the unions her son died asking for. In the summer of 1987, as the dictatorship cracked, more than three thousand strikes erupted in three months, the Great Workers' Struggle, and Korean workers won their unions and their democracy in the same season. Then the honest part: a wealthy OECD democracy that ratified the ILO's freedom-of-association conventions only in 2021; a workforce where 38.2% of wage workers are 'non-regular' (August 2025, Statistics Korea) and stand outside most of what the unions won; union density of about 13% (2022, Ministry of Employment and Labor) with bargaining coverage barely higher, because bargaining stops at the company gate; and a repression mechanism students will not have seen anywhere else in this track, civil damages suits and provisional seizure of wages and homes brought against individual strikers, which can financially destroy a worker without ever jailing one. The decade-long fight over that mechanism, the 'yellow envelope law,' is taught dated and unresolved. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.